ArrrrCamp #6 - Piotr Szotkowski - Persist, Little Objects!

Piotr Szotkowski is an assistant professor at Warsaw University of Technology (where he happily sneaks Ruby, EventMachine and newfangled database systems into the creaking world of twentieth-century academia), a Ruby developer at Rebased and an alumnus of Mendicant University. He’s also a long-time contributor to various open source projects for the civic sector and co-organiser of NetWtorek – monthly NetTuesday meetings of people from the NGO/non-profit and IT sectors, as well as SocHack – quarterly 48-hour hackatons for worthy causes, in coordination with Random Hacks of Kindness, Open Data Day and Open Education Week.

Persist, Little Objects!
Object persistence in Ruby is a tricky subject – everyone knows how to do it (‘simply use an ORM, plug it into a relational database and you’re done!’), most know the drawbacks (‘well, sure, you need to use a document database for the more schema-less cases… or serialise the variable parts… and, of course, object references need to be handled separately…’), but few experiment with alternatives.

This talk, after recalling the popular database-driven persistence solutions, concentrates on the less known, but more interesting and often quite useful approaches – from file-based PStore (ideal for small apps), through Candy’s out-of-the-way magic, to MagLev’s true cross-process transparent object persistence.